How many inverted femtobarns...
... until one of them gets to dress up as Palpatine and cackle about "fully armed and operational"?
A 10-year construction project in CERN's Swiss/French mountain lair has come to an end – and a few years of testing and integration are about to begin. By 2021, the proton-smasher will have a new linear accelerator, Linac 4, replacing its 1970s-era Linac 2. The first step in the chain of particle acceleration that culminates …
When the electron was discovered, people were saying much the same thing. I guess they were right, and there are now no applications in the whole world based upon technology that manipulates electrons.
...or maybe you are just a dullard with a lack of imagination, which is why those working at CERN are generally considered to be a lot brighter than Brexit-voting dolts like you.
When you get a bunch of really smart people together, give them a lot of money, and ask them to do things that are hard and have never been done before, they tend to invent some amazing things. Even if the original problem you set them isn't useful, the tools and components they develop can often have a wider application.
For example, a CERN scientist invented the world wide web, to help scientists there collaborate. That turned out to be pretty useful to the rest of the world!
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I'm still boggling at "hydrogen with an extra electron".
They're talking about a hydrogen ion. A neutral hydrogen molecule (H2) is comprised of two hydrogen atoms which are covalently bound. If you break this bond you get either two neutral radicals (H.), consisting of a nucleus (a single proton in this case) and an orbiting electron, or two ions (H+ and H-), one (H+) which has no electrons, and one which has two (H-). They then accelerate the negative ion (H-) using an electric field, before stripping the two electrons. What remains is an accelerated H+ ion. Because the hydrogen nucleus is the simplest element consisting only of a single proton, the H+ is generally referred to as a proton, rather than hydrogen ion, although the two names are equally valid.
I'm pretty sure both linac 2 & 4 start with neutral hydrogen as the input. The first stage in linac 4 converts the hydrogen into h- ions. The equivalent step in linac 2 strips the electrons away to yield protons. The former is a slightly more complicated process and warrants its own block in diagrams of the system.
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So, could possibly be mounted in the axis of a naval vessel, the sort with the power already in place for rail guns?
As for what happened to Lineac3, they're just doing all the marketing in binary, "The Lineac 1000" will sound much better than Lineac 8 when some president announces it is being deployed to quell whatever fuzzy-wuzzies we're not friends with at that particular time.
So, could possibly be mounted in the axis of a naval vessel, the sort with the power already in place for rail guns?
That would work just fine, as long as the weight of the thing didn't sink them, and their target is magnetically confined in a vacuum.
So, could possibly be mounted in the axis of a naval vessel, the sort with the power already in place for rail guns?
Possibly (though I imagine operations consumes quite a bit of power) but why would you want to do that? Hard to imagine a less effective weapon than a few dozen protons, even if they *are* travelling at relativistic speeds. You wouldn't want to stick your head in the way, but it's not going to be any use as a weapon.
You'll be wanting the Enthusiast OC X-TREME Ti Version
Personally I think this whole thing is gonna end up like the intro to the classic game Another World.
When have you seen anyone working at an accelerator own a Ferrari...
lots!, the shift working machine operators at the PS & LEC, LHC used to earn a tidy sum for the complex job and the sometimes very long hours . . .plus if you had a diplomatic post (many grades offer this) then you could buy any car, and sometimes anything else, tax free.
However, CERN staff, being sensible, did vote a few years ago for a decrease in their wages, in order to spend more on the LHC physics budget
Delighted to find this is still online, 20 years after I raided it to customise the Windows startup / shutdown sounds...
http://debian.man.ac.uk/.f/pub/misc/blakes7/sounds/
Little known fact: Avon demonstrates what is, in effect, Ssh tunnelling via Orac (on what looks like a beach in Essex) to Zen on board the Liberator at the start of S3E1.
I would get out more, but I'm a sad bastard :)
> Why do they add an extra electron and then remove them all. Why not skip the first step?
Because you can use an electric/magnetic field to exert a force on an electrically charged atom (has the extra electron). If you don't add the extra electron, the atom is neutral, and won't be affected by the field in the accelerator. Once they've shoved it up to the desired speed, they remove the electrons because all they really want is the proton.
Why they initially add an electron to start with H- instead of removing an electron and starting with H+ is another question...
"Why do they add an extra electron and then remove them all. Why not skip the first step?"
Because the main ring accelerates positively charged protons. It would be difficult to inject the protons from the linear accelerator as there would be no way to merge the trajectories. By using H- the trajectories are in opposite directions in a magnetic field and the two streams of particles can be merged by stripping off the two electrons where the two beams are (almost) tangent to one another.
Protium = 99.98% of the world's hydrogen. It contains one proton and one electron. It is arguably the simplest configuration. You could smash lead particles together (and there are experiments that do), but you would have to strip all those pesky neutrons out. It's easier to do with hydrogen. Nevermind the fact that hydrogen is... plentiful in the universe (and hence the experiments make sense).